Rachel just used the Google laptop to buy tickets online for “True Grit” and needed to print a confirmation. She discovered that we had to use cloud printing to print from the Google laptop to a Windows laptop connected to a printer.

Here’s what we did…following these instructions:

Because I don’t have a PC, I started Parallels on my mac. I then setup my HP printer on my XP virtual machine.

Install the Chrome browser in XP (I installed 8.0.552.224).

Go to Settings (the wrench icon) -> Options -> Under The Hood tab.

The instructions said that I should see a Google Cloud Print section on the bottom. I didn’t. After some searching, I found this post in the Chrome forum and the key is to enable this option first by entering “about:flags” in the browser address bar!

Type “about:flags” in the address bar…you’ll see a list of flags/features that you can enable. Enable the Cloud Print Proxy flag. Then click on the button at the button of the page to restart Chrome.

Once the Chrome browser has restarted, you should see the Cloud Printing option under Options -> Under The Hood.

Configure the rest by following the steps from the instructions page. Basically you need to sign in to your Google account so that when the Google notebook sends a print request to the cloud, the Chrome browser running in XP can pull it down from the cloud and then print to the printer attached to that machine.

Print a test page…and voila!

For me it’s not ideal because I have to launch the XP virtual machin in Parallels on my Mac, but I have a way to print from my Google laptop. Yay!

UPDATE

I just found out that if you install the Developer version of Chrome all of this would be easier. I didn’t try it but I suspect that the Cloud Printing flag would have already been setup.

I got a nice surprise on Monday night after I got home from our work holiday party. My neighbor dropped off a package that he signed for me. It felt pretty substantial. It was approximately the size of two pizza boxes stacked on top of each other.

When I opened up the outer box the inner box had an exploded view illustration of a mouse driven contraption. It took me a few seconds and then it clicked…it was the Google laptop that I had applied for as a beta tester!!! I was totally excited.

Its case is designed similar to the black Macbook. The finish is also similar…a bit rubbery. I really like the feel. I powered it up and started to play with it. The trackpad was the first thing that I noticed…because it didn’t work that well. I’m still trying to get use to it. I think the setting is too sensitive and there’s not a lot of configuration that can be adjusted in the settings. As part of the beta testing program you’re suppose to submit comments, bugs, etc. So, I think this was one of the first comment that I submitted.

All in all it’s pretty cool. This is Google’s foray into hardware that ties to their apps in the cloud infrastructure. I’m excited to be one of the first users/testers of this concept. I’ll be posting more…stay tuned.